12/04/97 - 1316
Miami Sound Lab Report
USA (VNN) - The following report was issued by George Blackwell of
Soundtrack, Inc. in Miami, a professional Sound Studio that also
does work for law enforcement:
"First of all... what I remember hearing on his tape (after clean-up)
was: "It's not poison in the milk" or, allowing for an unusual
speech pattern by the speaker: "It's not poisoned milk."
The procedure you described is accurate, for the most part. On
my first two passes, I used low- and high-pass digital filters
to eliminate upper and lower ranges of noise which contained little
usable signal. THEN I used Digidesigns' DINR, which is a set of
digital algorithms for the reduction of steady-state background
noise. (I made no attempt to eliminate ALL the noise, however,
because selecting for maximum reduction generates digital artifacts
which can clutter and garble a target signal almost as much as
the removed noise.) Also, at each step I "normalized" the recording,
which means raising the overall level to a point .01dB below the
absolute digital maximum. This allows me to work with full 16-bit
dynamic range during any processing.
When I had reached the point of optimum clarity (still pretty
noisy, of course) I put the target section in a loop and began
to vary the sampling rate in order to shift the pitch up and down,
while trying to understand what was being said.
As in handwriting analysis, one calls upon other skills besides
engineering for this type of work. At this point I relied heavily
upon my 25 years of experience in recording voices for commercials,
narrations, etc., and my musical training.
I first noted the rhythm of the complete phrase (hard to reproduce
in email, but I'll try):
Dit, dit, dah-dah-dah-dah, dit (seven syllables)
Isa suggested that the first words were "Is the poison in the
milk", but I heard no characteristic "ZZ" sound in the first syllable.
What I heard was "T-followed-by-Z" as in the word "It's". Also,
discounting what I think is a lip-smack, the word's attack seemed
to have been formed without using the tongue, as would have been
the case if the word were "Let's".
As for the rest of the phrase "...not poison in the milk", that's
simply the way I interpret it, based on what I heard.
An alternative possibility is that the section "...son in the...",
owing to a peculiarity of pronunciation, could be: "...soned milk".
This interpretation contains two less syllables on paper, but
it might have been the result of the speaker's over-enunciation
of the word "poison-e-d", as might happen while trying to whisper
with extreme clarity.
As to sending you a copy... Isa has the ZIP-disk with the finished
samples. I do not retain copies. However, I believe he has uploaded
them to the VNN website as both Quicktime and WAV files, if you'd
like to download them.
I hope this answers your questions. (Actually I may have swamped
you with more than you'd like... sorry.)
Cheers,
George Blackwell
